Latest revision as of 15:34, 6 December 2018

The Cambridge University Press cover.

This is the home page of the textbook "Modern Robotics: Mechanics, Planning, and Control," Kevin M. Lynch and Frank C. Park, Cambridge University Press, 2017, ISBN 9781107156302. Purchase the hardback through Amazonor through Cambridge University Press, or check out the free preprint version below.

If you find this book useful for a course or self-study, please contact Kevin or Frank and let us know!

Book

This book is the result of course notes developed over many years for the course M2794.0027 Introduction to Robotics at Seoul National University and ME 449 Robotic Manipulation at Northwestern University. The evolving course notes have been posted on the internet for years to support these classes.

The for-purchase version of the book from Cambridge University Press has improved layout and typesetting, updated figures, different pagination (and fewer pages), and more careful copyediting, and it is considered the "official" version of the book. But the online preprint version of the book has the same chapters, sections, and exercises, and it is quite close in content to the Cambridge-published version. The current, and final preprint, online version of the book is dated May 2017. We posted preliminary versions of the book in October and November 2016; those versions should be discarded.

We are posting four versions of the book. All versions have exactly the same contents and pagination. They differ only in the sizes of the margins and the size of the print, as manipulated in Adobe Acrobat after latex'ing. Two of the versions have working hyperlinks for navigating the book on your computer or tablet.

With working hyperlinks. (To navigate the book using the hyperlinks, click on the hyperlink. To go back where you came from, choose the button or keystroke appropriate to your pdf reader. For example, on the Mac with Acrobat or Acrobat Reader, use cmd-left arrow. With Preview on the Mac, use cmd-[. Some readers on other operating systems use alt-left arrow. You can google to see which solution works for your pdf reader.)

2up version. Printable version with 2 book pages per page, for saving paper if you have good eyes. Approximately 8.5 pt font equivalent.

These files have been compressed to about 7 MB. Let us know if you have any problems reading them. Please note that recent versions of the default Mac OS X pdf reader, Preview, are known to have some bugs displaying certain images in pdf files. If a figure is not appearing properly, please try a better pdf viewer, like Acrobat Reader.

The student should also be prepared to program, but only basic programming skills are needed. Code is provided in python (freely available), MATLAB (for purchase, or you could use the freely available GNU Octave clone), and Mathematica (for purchase), so those languages are preferred.

Software

The software accompanying the book is written in Mathematica, MATLAB, and Python. It is written to be educational and to reinforce the concepts in the book, not to be as computationally efficient or robust as possible.

The origin of the software is student solutions to homework exercises. A major update was committed in January 2017, correcting some bugs in the earlier version.

Simulation

We have found the V-REP robot simulation environment to be a valuable learning tool accompanying the book. It is free for educational use and cross platform. In ME 449 at Northwestern, we use it to experiment with the kinematics of different robots and to animate solutions to inverse kinematics, dynamic simulations, and controllers.

This page provides "scenes" that allow you to interactively explore the kinematics of different robots (e.g., the Universal Robots UR5 6R robot arm and the KUKA youBot mobile manipulator) and to animate trajectories that are the results of exercises in chapters on kinematics, dynamics, and control.

Using the Online Course Materials in a Traditional Classroom Course

If you are using the book in a traditional university setting, you can ask your students to sign up for the relevant courses on Coursera (see above). They can audit the courses, so they don't have to pay. They will have access to the video lectures and to the video comprehension questions that follow each video lecture. They will also have access to discussion forums. (They won't have access to graded tests and peer-graded assignments, which require paying the Coursera fee.) If students watch the videos and do the reading before class, you can spend class time working on example problems, homework problems, or discussing points where confusion arises, rather than delivering a traditional lecture.

Supplemental Information

UR5 parameters you can use for dynamic simulations (note: the values are not exact, and do not account for the effect of gearing at the joints)

About the Authors

Kevin M. Lynch is Professor and Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Northwestern University. He is a member of the Neuroscience and Robotics Lab and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. His research focuses on dynamics, motion planning, and control for robot manipulation and locomotion; self-organizing multi-agent systems; and physically interacting human-robot systems.

He is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, former Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Conference Editorial Board, and a former Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. He is a co-author of The Principles of Robot Motion (MIT Press, 2005) and Embedded Computing and Mechatronics with the PIC32 Microcontroller (Elsevier, 2015), an IEEE fellow, and the recipient of the IEEE Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation, Northwestern's Professorship of Teaching Excellence, and the Northwestern Teacher of the Year award in engineering. He earned a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Frank C. Park received his BS in electrical engineering from MIT and his PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard University. From 1991 to 1995 he was assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Since 1995 he has been professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Seoul National University, where he is currently chair of the department. His research interests are in robot mechanics, planning and control, vision and image processing, and related areas of applied mathematics. He has been an IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Lecturer, and received best paper awards for his work on visual tracking and parallel robot design. He has served on the editorial boards of the Springer Handbook of Robotics, Springer Advanced Tracts in Robotics (STAR), Robotica, and the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. He has held adjunct faculty positions at the NYU Courant Institute and the Interactive Computing Department at Georgia Tech. He is a fellow of the IEEE, former Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and developer of the edX course Robot Mechanics and Control I, II.

Mechatronics

Modern Robotics is written at the system level: you learn about the kinematics, dynamics, motion planning, and control of an entire robot system. If you would like to learn more about the details of implementation, e.g., joint-level feedback control, driving motors (including brushed, brushless, steppers, and servos), gearing, sensors, signal processing, etc., check out Embedded Computing and Mechatronics by Lynch, Marchuk, and Elwin, Elsevier 2015.